Sessions

APIs for Humans: The Developer Experience

APIs make it possible for machines to communicate with one another. But the dots are connected by humans (for now, at least!) and human-friendly APIs are an important part of the developer experience. This session will cover some tricks to provide proactive support and improve the developer experience by using logging, documentation and an API itself. I’ll briefly introduce the main components of developer experience for APIs and discuss some easy wins. Then we’ll dive into logging with some real-world examples gathered from New Relic Insights. From these examples we’ll see how logs can be used to identify friction points which cause developer frustration within an API. I’ll cover specific cases for providing and potentially automating support, improving documentation, and updating the API to provide more useful information to the developer. Then I’ll show a few more examples anecdotally demonstrating the removal of the original friction. Wrapping up I’ll discuss how this process can be used to create a feedback loop for improving the developer experience, helping to scale API support along with the API.